St Dominic was a mendicant. Going place to place, preaching and begging for food and lodging. Perhaps it is apt then, that here in Australia, his feast day has moved around a little! Since St Mary of the Cross has taken the 8th of December, we celebrate his feast day today.
Thank you to Fr Robert Krishna OP for his sermon below which looks at the very Dominican task of preaching. 

There are many stories of St Dominic which illustrate his total dedication to preaching. My own favourite story, partly because of the setting, is when he sat up all night arguing with a pub owner to bring him back to Jesus, and to the God whom Jesus reveals in his fullness.

But this raises the question. In the modern, pluralistic world, isn’t this sort of thing out of place? Isn’t it somewhat arrogant and disrespectful?

The answer to this question lies in who Christ is, and what preaching is supposed to be. Christ is not just another great religious figure, like the Buddha or Mohammed. Christ is not a cleverly designed myth like Jupiter or any of the pagan gods. Rather, in Christ, something absolutely new is taking place.

In Christ, God himself reaches out to us in friendship. In Christ, God’s own kingdom comes close to us, as Jesus tells his disciples in today’s Gospel. He comes to us not with trumpets blaring, not like any other great warrior striking his enemies down by the sword, but humbly, in complete poverty, as a little child whose parents could barely afford a roof over his head. He comes to bear all the evil that the world can inflict on him, to absorb that evil in the crucifixion, and to defeat it in his resurrection.

If in Christ, God himself reaches out to us, then when we are called to proclaim the word we are not sharing a mere idea or a philosophy. Which is not to deny, of course, that ideas and philosophies are very helpful in sharing Christ. Still first and foremost, we are called to share Christ our friend. We are sharing someone who being God, bent down to us, came among us in poverty and humility, and gave up his own life for our sake.

We are sharing Christ, who revealed to us the fullness of who God was and how much he loved us. But if we are to share this Christ, then we need to show him to the world as he was. This is why, when Jesus sends out his disciples, tells them to travel as poor preachers. This is why he highlights their vulnerability as sheep among wolves. This is not a matter of naivety, but of authenticity and truth. But poverty and vulnerability are only part of what it means to represent Christ. They are necessary, but not enough.

St. Dominic himself found that there were any number of groups who were attracted by the idea of poverty and vulnerability, but the Christ to whom they appealed had nothing to do with the Christ of Christian history. Sometimes with all sincerity, because they were misled by others, sometimes because they set themselves up as teachers of the faith in opposition to the Church and the creed we all profess as Christians, people had set up for themselves a Christ who did not have a true human body, or a Christ who was not God, a Christ who was a mere prophet, or a Christ who was a mythical being like any pagan deity.

They had stopped listening to the truth, and became diverted to myths. Against this, St Dominic emphasized that in order to preach Christ, we need to know him. We need know him not as the world presents him, but as he really was, as he is set forth in the Bible and in what the Church teaches.

This is why, in the order that St Dominic founded, he placed such a great importance on study and on personal prayer. Because by study we can discover more and more of who God is and how we can truly preach him. We can see how he has revealed himself to humanity in the Scriptures and in the history of the Church, in the lives of the millions of Christians who have gone before us marked with the sign of faith.

By prayer we can rejoice in his presence as one friend rejoices in the presence of another. As lambs sent out among wolves, acknowledging our weaknesses, our poverty and our vulnerability, we can grab hold of his hand stretched out to us.

Let us then celebrate Dominic not just today and tomorrow, not only in feasting and rejoicing in God’s good creation. Let us celebrate Dominic as he himself would have wanted us to – by preaching the poor and vulnerable Christ in our lives, by devoting ourselves to study and prayer so that we can get to know him.

Let us allow him to transform us so that through us, God can reveal his salvation to all the world.

~Fr Robert Krishna
Fr Robert Krishna is a Dominican priest who serves in Melbourne as the Chaplain to Monash University and Mannix College.